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JUNE 18, 2001, VOL.157 NO.24
Death Knell
A man walks into an elementary school, kills eight children and leaves all of Japan asking why
BY
TIM LARIMER
 JIJI PRESS/AFP. Schoolchildren accompanied by their parents leave the elementary school
in Osaka where a man killed eight students on Friday, June 8 |
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Help me!" the children in a second-floor classroom heard the feeble, desperate cry from downstairs in an elementary school in Ikeda, a suburb of Osaka in western Japan. Then the screams grew louder. On the first floor, second-graders were just finishing music class when a large man in cream-colored trousers madly dashed toward them, muttering incoherently as he attacked pupils with a lethal 15-cm-bladed kitchen knife. He stabbed three boys standing by a chalkboard. When a girl tried to escape, he chased her down a corridor. "Run! Run!" a second child yelled. A teacher threw a chair at the attacker, who dodged it and then stabbed him. Then the man ran into another classroom, leaving behind a trail of blood, tears and traumatized 7-year-olds. Several children fled the school to a supermarket across the street. The white shirt of one boy's school uniform was drenched in blood. "A strange man came in the school and I got stabbed," the second-grade boy told cashier Ikiyo Irie, as she laid him down on a piece of cardboard. Panicked children from other classrooms raced across the dirt field behind the school. After the assailant entered another room and stabbed more children, a teacher tackled him and grabbed his knife.
It lasted 10 minutes. In that short period, the intruder had killed eight children, injured 13 other pupils and two teachers, and further shattered Japan's disintegrating confidence that it is immune from the kind of senseless violence it associates with the U.S. It was the worst mass killing of schoolchildren in Japan's history, but only the latest in a series of brutal crimes where a knife is often the weapon of choice (gun ownership is outlawed). "Schools were always regarded as sacred zones, but not anymore," says Yo Yoshino, who lives near the Ikeda school and tutored some of its pupils at an independent "cram" school.
For the Japanese, one more wall of safety has been breached. One more belief exploded. Despite rising rates of violent crime, people still generally feel safe, safe enough to let 6-year-olds ride the Tokyo subways by themselves. Yet since the subway sarin-gas attacks at the hands of the Aum Shinrikyo religious cult in 1995 left 12 people dead and thousands injured, the Japanese have had to face the realization that something was becoming terribly unhinged in their well-ordered society. In 1997 a 14-year-old Kobe teenager killed and beheaded an 11-year-old playmate. A year later four people died after eating arsenic-laced curry at a village festival. In December 1999 a teenage assailant knifed to death a 7-year-old boy on a school playground. Last August a 15-year-old newspaper delivery boy stabbed six sleeping neighbors, killing three of them. Last December a 17-year-old boy went berserk in Tokyo's Shibuya district, assaulting seven strangers with a baseball bat. "These children are at their cutest, sweetest age," Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said after Friday's massacre. "How can we deal with the fact that our safe society is beginning to collapse?"
What made last week's tragedy so hard to comprehend was the young age of its victims. Why this school? Why these kids? Ikeda Elementary School, affiliated with a teacher-training college, Osaka Kyoiku University, is a competitive preparatory school where kindergartners take entrance exams and interview for the coveted 688 spots. Their parents are Japan's educated Elite—doctors, lawyers, professionals—and the school is located on a spacious, leafy campus in a quiet neighborhood. Graduates often eventually go on to enroll in top universities. "If it were a person who had something specific against the school, maybe I could understand," says Ikuyo Yamao, the mother of a fourth-grade girl. "But it was just totally random and that makes me scared."
The causes may be murky, but it is clear that the man accused of the crime, 37-year-old Mamoru Takuma, has serious problems. He dropped out of high school in 1980, was discharged from the Air Force after one year for unknown reasons, and worked as a bus driver. In 1998 he was employed as a school janitor. A year later he was arrested on suspicion of drugging four teachers who were hospitalized after consuming tea he had brewed while working at an Osaka elementary school. Takuma was fired from his job, but he wasn't prosecuted: a judge ruled he was mentally incapable of taking responsibility for the crime. He was committed to a mental health hospital for less than a month. Said Takuma at the time: "My wife wanted to divorce me, and I wasn't having good relations with co-workers. I didn't bear grudges against those four teachers, but I just wanted to release my stress."
Judging by comments he made to police, "stress" had overwhelmed Takuma again. "I want to die," police said he told them after they carted him away. "If I killed children, I knew I would get the death penalty." According to police, Takuma said he had taken an overdose of tranquilizers before going on the knifing spree. No one really knows what twisted logic motivated Takuma, although Takuma's father told Japanese newspapers that his son once did poorly on a test at the Ikeda school. But armchair psychologists are already diagnosing the case. "The noises children make sound good to many people, but for someone who feels victimized—and I think this suspect is probably one of them—those noises sound like children are mocking him," says Susumu Oda, a psychiatrist specializing in criminal cases at Osaka's Tezukayamgakuin University. "He worked in an elementary school and got fired. Now the subject of his resentment expanded to schools in general."
That's hardly a message that will reassure traumatized parents. Schools all over Japan dismissed classes early last Friday, holding emergency meetings with parents and escorting children home. "This kind of thing should never happen," said Education Minister Atsuko Toyama, announcing the creation of an emergency task force to investigate the incident and provide counseling to the children. "Schools should be places where children feel safe and secure." Will they ever feel quite as sheltered again? Or, like the Columbine massacre in the U.S. state of Colorado two years ago, will the Ikeda episode inflict Japan's schoolchildren, teachers and parents with long-term emotional scars? Until last week, Japanese schools, including the one in Ikeda, were typically open and easy to enter. During school hours, gates and doors are left unlocked. There are no security guards posted. So it was no trouble for Takuma to drive his silver sedan into the school's parking lot, pull a knife out of a box sitting on the front seat, walk around behind the school building and quietly enter a classroom through a ground-floor window. "We always felt safe here," says Yamao, pointing to the wooded field behind her house, two blocks from the Ikeda school. She doesn't feel safe anymore. Much of Japan, trying to make sense of this latest horrific crime, is feeling the same way, wondering what kind of country it has become.
With reporting by Ginny Parker/Ikeda and Sachiko Sakamaki and Hiroko Tashiro/Tokyo
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